Chindia, Russia, Europe: the peaceful rise of Eurasia

From the 3rd millennium BC into the 3rd millennium AD

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Coined recently to capture the growing synergy
between China and India, driven now by the rapid convergence of their expanding
economies and the simultaneous rise to world-power status of these two
modernizing nation-states, the term 'Chindia' is based on mutual perceptions
that draw increasingly upon millennial religio-cultural exchanges and profound
civilizational complementarities. Though both these ancient worldviews had been
inward-looking and convinced of their ethnocentric superiority over the
barbarians, they profoundly influenced their neighboring peoples, reshaping
their diverse cultures so as to make the label 'Indo-China' an appropriate
shorthand designation for the whole of (pre-Islamic) Asia. Imperial China often
expanded her borders to counter threats from the north and west, assimilated
successive conquerors (Qin, Yuan, Qing, etc., dynasties) into her universalizing
Confucian outlook, was acknowledged benign suzerain through regular tribute from
vassals as faraway as South-East Asia, and spread her contagious civilizational
ethos through the Sinified vehicle of Mahâyâna Buddhism all across East Asia to
Japan. Despite her time-tested indigenous socio-political framework held
together by the unified state and (its bureaucratic elite sharing a) common
written language, China's openness to foreign sources of spiritual inspiration
and the accompanying intellectual ferment is best exemplified by her receptivity
to and transformation by/of Buddhism. The dazzling success of the Dharma across
the whole of Asia contributed as much to the prestige of Buddhism within South
Asia as to the efflorescence of Sanskritic culture abroad. India's genius has
consisted not so much in proselytizing an intransigent religio-cultural ideology
through the force of arms or subtler modes of politico-economic coercion but in
repeatedly coming up with creative solutions to her own internal problems of
managing and celebrating the proliferation of diversity, paradigms that were
universal enough in design, scope, and applicability to be eagerly adopted and
adapted by her neighbors as guiding principles for the evolution of their native
traditions. Whereas the ideological debate between Buddhism and Brahmanism
remained wide-ranging and intense within Indian culture, the otherwise
antithetical images of the universalizing renouncer and the ethnocentric
intellectual fused abroad to become hardly distinguishable in the figure of
composite the Indian sage. That the 'Sanskritization' of so much of South-East
Asia occurred without even the knowledge, much less the complicity, of the vast
majority of the Indian elite is evidenced by the fact that these foreign lands
hardly figured within the Hindu geopolitical imagination (bharata-varSa).
Far from resisting Chinese or Indian hegemony, these autonomous centers,
exemplified above all by Buddhist Tibet, developed highly original syntheses
that served (as more than just two-way conduits) to facilitate the (re-)
emerging Chindian matrix. Even as late as the 18th century, when China was at
the widest extent of its imperial power, this inter-civilizational dynamic was
brilliantly embodied by the
Qianlong Emperor, an 'alien' who hailed from shamanistic Manchu tribes that
looked up rather towards the Mongols of Central Asia, became wholly steeped in
Mandarin culture, owed personal religious allegiance to the Panchen Lama, was
revered as a bodhisattva by Buddhists beyond China's borders, accommodated the
Muslim sensibilities of his newly acquired Turkish subjects, and was eventually
entombed per his wishes in a coffin engraved with Sanskrit prayers.

Sino-Indian reconciliation today amidst lingering tensions from the colonial
era has been greatly facilitated and encouraged by the post-Soviet re-emergence
of Russia as the key player in the geostrategic equations of Central Asia.
Culminating by the dawn of the 20th century, the Slavic pacification of Central
and East Asia had already eliminated the threat of invasion by (subsequently
Islamized) nomadic Turkic-Mongolian tribes to which Iran, South Asia, and China
had always been subject.

While emerging from their common devastation by colonial force of arms, the
two nations have had to come to terms with and embrace globalizing modernity
through divergent, even diametrically opposed, survival strategies, dictated by
their distinctive pre-existent civilization paradigms. Forced to break out of
her civilizational isolation

Central Asia, once the perennial home of nomadic threats to the rich
sedentary civilizations to the south, was completely pacified by the end of the
19th century by Russia, the (re-) emerging Eurasian power, that now plays a
crucial strategic role in providing a security umbrella to the
self-determination of India and China, to the extent of becoming a willing
facilitator, and beneficiary, in the reassertion of Chindia as constructive
force in the creation of a more equitable, multipolar, world-order. [paragraph
here on Russia's identity-crisis being torn between the West and Eurasianism]

An overall dynamics of regional confrontation based on seemingly well-founded
suspicions of the Other could result in the mutually reinforcing ideological
blocs along the following lines: an increasingly xenophobic, militaristic, and
expansionist (Han) China, even more oppressive of her own peoples, that would
feel obliged to chart out a counter-imperial course against yet modeled upon
(its current encirclement by) a unilateral American power that has few scruples
about using her neighbors (including Taiwan and Japan) as proxies; a dominating
made-in-USA strain of Hindutva pitted against Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, and
other 'minorities' only to resemble its Abrahamic nemesis all the more, thereby
provoking a million mutinies that spread like wildfire to engulf her neighboring
multiethnic and multi-confessional states, and where the celebrated diversity of
the 'Hindu' past translates into the irremediable contemporary chaos; a
disillusioned post-Soviet Russia that throws in her lot with an encroaching
Europe Union in an attempt to survive by steering a mid-course between the
trans-Atlantic alliance and the growing conflicts in Asia; in sum an
intransigently nationalistic parting of ways that would oblige their Muslim
populations to fall back even more uncompromisingly on fundamentalist fervor and
make violent common cause with the world-wide Umma; alienated from each other,
all three societies will tend to fall apart caught in the indiscriminate
crossfire of the "War of Terror" between the West and Islam for global
supremacy.

Even while simultaneously ensuring her own geo-strategic security and access
to (increasingly scarce) world-resources by systematically courting India's
contentious neighbors and extending her reach towards the Indian ocean, China
has been actively promoting burgeoning bilateral trade, mutual and joint
investments (even elsewhere in the 'Third' World), and the renaissance of shared
civilizational memory (such as
funding and re-founding the international Buddhist university at Nalanda).
Just as a globally re-assertive 'Orthodox' Russia is instrumental in bringing
the two rising continental giants closer together within a common Asian security
framework, so has 'Confucian' China begun nudging 'Islamic' Pakistan towards a
rapprochement over religio-culturally hybrid Kashmir with her fraternal 'Hindu'
twin. As the shared (otherwise top-down) political will towards cultural
rapprochement, buttressed by economic-cum-security needs, rapidly extends
(despite barriers of language, culture and history) to their
populations-at-large, the following regional developments may be surmised.
Deliberate transformation of an otherwise depopulating (Slavic) Russia under
concerted Sino-Indian influence into a beneficent Asian power, a techno-military
bulwark against further Western encroachment. Planetary reach of the Chinese
dragon's economic-cum-diplomatic clout, both actively facilitated and moderated
by Indo-Russian cooperation into a powerhouse for uplifting the material
conditions of all subaltern peoples who have yet to free themselves from the
'globalizing' yoke of (neo-) colonialism. Wooing the Indian elephant, with its
footprints among the increasingly affluent and assertive Hindu-American
diaspora, from a culturally subaltern role in furthering neo-imperial interests
into ...

A concerted attempt by this triumvirate of world-powers to peacefully
integrate their otherwise recalcitrant Muslim subjects and thereby building and
consolidating religio-cultural ties to the Islamic world